The present invention relates to oven structures and, more particularly, to an improved food oven and method of preparing food characterized by a double-oven compartment structure and a novel electronic control system adapted to permit independent baking, broiling, barbecuing, smoking, and hold-warming of foods disposed within each oven compartment.
In recent years, there has been a substantial increase in the number of prepared meals being served to the general public through restaurant establishments. Due to this increase, the general public has become more diverse and sophisticated in its menu desires which has resulted in restaurant establishments having to diversify the scope and improve the quality of their menu to accommodate the average restaurant customer.
To meet this need, a variety of commercial cooking equipment has heretofore been utilized in the prior art such as grills, convection ovens, charbroilers, microwave ovens, and the like. Although all of these prior art cooking devices have proven generally effective, they all possess inherent deficiencies which have detracted from their overall effectiveness in the commercial trade.
Foremost of these deficiencies has been the inability of the majority of the prior art cooking apparatus to be utilized for differing cooking applications such as charbroiling, barbecuing, baking, and/or smoking. Thus, restaurant establishments desiring to prepare foods in such differing applications have been required to purchase separate cooking equipment for each of these independent cooking applications. The use of such multiple prior art equipment has proven cost prohibitive due to its extremely high capital cost as well as its increased space requirements within the kitchen area of the restaurant establishments.
In addition, the prior art cooking devices have typically been extremely labor intensive requiring food to be continuously observed, turned, and/or basted during preparation. In this regard, skilled chefs or food technicians have routinely been mandated to insure consistent quality in the prepared food product.
Further, due to the prior art devices typically requiring a prolonged start-up or warm-up period to obtain proper cooking temperatures, most of the prior equipment has required continuous operation throughout the entire business hours of the restaurant establishment thereby significantly increasing energy consumption and costs.
Thus, there exists a substantial need in the art for an improved food oven apparatus and method of preparing food which can be utilized to prepare various food menus at relatively low cost and insures consistent food quality without the need for skilled labor.